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Adium 1.3.8 is now available. This release contains the connection fixes for Facebook chat, as well as a small fix for Snow Leopard users to fix the events list. There’s more Snow Leopard fixes on the upcoming 1.4 beta release which we felt were too broad of changes to include in the 1.3.8 release, sorry. An updated beta for 1.4 with the Facebook fix will be coming shortly through the usual channels. Enjoy!

NB: If you’re getting the CAPTCHA popup, disconnect and wait 10 minutes before you try to connect again. CAPTCHA itself isn’t working, but the message just means to calm down trying to connect.

Due to what appears to be a protocol change, Facebook chat is currently not working. The author of our Facebook plugin is working on a fix. We’ll keep you posted on any new releases that fix it.

In the meantime, feel free to send Facebook some feedback about wanting an official (as in, we don’t mimic the web browser) Facebook chat protocol. If they implement something that isn’t subject to breaking, we’d be able to avoid problems such as this.

Adium 1.3.7 is now available. This release contains a security fix and fixes issues where privacy lists weren’t working for AIM/ICQ users. An updated version of the Facebook chat plugin is also included to address problems with the CAPTCHA check. Additionally, iChat emoticons will now work correctly on Snow Leopard.

Adium 1.4b10 is also now available containing the above fixes, as well as a few other Snow Leopard fixes (such as XMPP SSL connections not working in certain cases, support for remembering to use “substitutions”), QQ client version support, a fix for logs being written incorrectly, and a bunch of other fixes.

Adium 1.3.6 is now available. It includes an updated version of libpurple which fixes the vulnerability revealed earlier this week which has the potential to allow another user to run code by sending you a specially crafted message over the MSN protocol plus many Yahoo regressions from 1.3.5, one of those being the problem where Yahoo contacts had signed off still appeared as online.

1.3.6 also features an updated version of the Facebook chat plugin, fixing a number of issues, which were present in Adium 1.3.5 including unwanted email notifications, dropped messages and missing contact icons. We therefore strongly recommend you update!

Meanwhile, work continues on Adium 1.4, the next major release, with tons of progress so far. You can join Adium 1.4 beta testing by enabling ‘Update to beta versions when available’ in your current version of Adium or by visiting the beta page.

As some of you may have heard, the Pidgin Project has just released Pidgin 2.6.0 which supports audio and video communication (commonly referred to as A/V or V/V) over XMPP (Jabber, Google Talk, etc.). First, a huge congratulations to the Pidgin team, for whom this is a major milestone!
Knowing that Adium and Pidgin share the same backend, libpurple, the logical question is:

What will happen in Adium? Where is Voice and Video support in our favorite Mac OS X chat client?

A small team volunteered then to tackle the great effort of implementing Audio and Video chat, using the partially-developed support found in libpurple at that time. It made a limited amount of progress, but two major barriers were encountered: First, libpurple wasn’t ready to provide reliable voice & video support. Second, the scope of the project far outweighed the available manpower. The project stalled before it even really took off.

The team at present

The Adium team currently has a fraction of the manpower it once did. We throw ourselves into this labor of love when possible, but the number of people who have committed code in the past 3 months can be counted on one hand. Adium has been, perhaps, its own worst enemy in terms of maintaining the team, as our developers commonly step from here to excellent but demanding jobs within and without the CS world (including multiple at Apple). We have even less manpower now than when efforts failed in late 2007.

We’re not complaining, we’re not offering excuses, and we’re not asking for donations of money or server resources.

We are seeking interested developers and designers!

Join an exciting, popular open source project with a proven track record of being both successful worldwide and a fantastic resumé builder. Voice & video offers a huge new domain to explore.

The state of the code

We have successfully compiled libpurple and its dependencies with voice & video support. What remains is implementation of libpurple’s media API and production of an Adium-quality UI for it. That will include a lot of code, though hopefully we’ll find that the QuickTime and Core Graphics frameworks in Mac OS X 10.5 can do much of the heavy lifting for us. We’ll also need icons. More development thoughts can be found on Adium’s VoiceAndVideo page.

Want to help?

Developers and designers, feel free to join us on IRC or email the Adium development mailing list… or dive right in and start contributing!

Zac West, developer and webmaster of Adium for the past several years, has been doing a fantastic job during the development cycle of Adium 1.4, not just with coding (including our upcoming Twitter and IRC support) but also with resource maintenance, organization, and direction. He has shown admirable dedication to this free, open source project, to the great benefit of the one million Adium users worldwide.

It’s my pleasure, with the support of the rest of the Adium development team, to name him co-lead developer of the Adium project, changing my own title to the same in the process.

Congratulations are in order! I look forward to the great places Zac will help us take Adium in the future.

Howdy folks. We’ve posted a release candidate for 1.3.5rc1. I don’t want to deal with having two betas simultaneously, so we’re keeping it short and simple here on the blog. The only changes are in libpurple and the Facebook chat plugin. Please respond here with any issues specifically related to 1.3.5 over 1.3.4.

Yahoo! has made a change on their server that prevents Adium 1.3.4 and the 1.4 betas from connecting. We have released a new beta, beta 7, which contains the fix.

As we’ve noted before, 1.4 will require Leopard. Those of you who are still hanging on to Tiger are currently stuck, as we do not yet have a fixed version for you. We’ll release a 1.3.5 shortly after Libpurple 2.5.7 comes out, as that version will also contain the fix. (Libpurple, for those of you who don’t know, is the library Adium uses to connect to Yahoo! and most other services.) The Adium 1.4 betas use pre-release versions of Libpurple 2.6.

I am very pleased to announce the availability of Adium 1.3.4, our latest stable release. This features mostly improvements to the core: an updated libpurple, and an updated Facebook chat plugin. This is a highly-recommended upgrade, as it fixes an issue where Facebook would connect to the server too fast, utilizing too much bandwidth. 1.3.4 is likely going to be our final release for 10.4 users.

Along with our release of 1.3.4, I’m terribly eager to announce the first of our series of betas for Adium 1.4, which features two new protocols, IRC and Twitter, as well as a ridiculously long list of improvements, including the latest and greatest in the world of libpurple. 1.4 requires 10.5, so sorry Tiger users. 🙁

From support for contacts in multiple groups, to an all-new authorizations window (which pulls together all authorization requests into one window), and more changes than you can think of, this is definitely an excellent release. Give it a shot, report any bugs, and enjoy your newfound pleasures!

If you’re looking for a group chat message style, since you can now set it independently of normal chats, feel free to check out my favorite, yMous. yMous has all the bells and whistles, and even includes topic support for Jabber and IRC chats.

We’re always looking for talented help to improve our code with us! See how you can help. Patches always welcome!

A big thanks to our host Network Redux, who recently moved us over to an even better hardware setup and our CDN provider CacheFly whose download speeds are blowing our mind.